The Black and the White

It's like The Beetles singing "All the Lonely People," (where do they all belong?); and like Hugh Grant's Island man character in About a Boy; It's like Cain in Genesis, with the sins of rage and jealousy knocking at his door; and like the Phoenix begging Wolverine: "Save me" in The Last Stand; It's like C.S. Lewis' "Dwarves-for-Dwarves" in The Last Battle, and like Solomon despairing: "Meaningless, meaningless, everything's meaningless" in Ecclesiastes; It's like The virgins with the oil lamps, waiting for the bridegroom to come, and like the whole world's collective reaction to first evidence of Jewish Holocaust It's like Oliver Twist, whispering, "Please, Sir, I want some more" in Dickens' novel; and like Matthew Good Band chanting the lyrics to "Load me up"; It's like The separation of the sheep from the goats when the Son of Man comes, and like God's offer to Israel to choose life or death again in Jeremiah's time; It's like black and white after the grey. It was an interesting day at the Distress Centre today. I nearly missed my shift because I rebelled against God and went back to bed instead of staying up to talk to him and start my day's toil at the U of C looking up information on stalking for my next school paper. I'm glad I went. Would you believe just 5 hours will afford me the rare opportunity to hear stories from bored, friendless, and healthless seniors tired of life; a brother of modern day pre-murderer Cain with a predecessor Melissa Hawach family tale; an MXPX "On the Outs" subject candidate; A Frank McCourt mother, except she had all girls, wasn't Irish, and isn't dead yet (no idea if her name was Angela); and a harassed intellectual with an overinvolved mother who has the mind of IT from Camazotz in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Would you further believe that from all that I suddenly understood the significance of why the chapter 24 good fig-bad fig analogy is given to Jeremiah after the Life-and-death prophecy in chapter 21? Now that you're thoroughly confused by all my DC, movie, music, novel, world history, current events, and biblical scripture references, allow me to explain. Since about the beginning of February this year, I have been slowly walking through the passages of Jeremiah with God using the Lectio Divina (method outlined in an earlier post). I try to read each chapter at least twice: once in the morning along with Zondervan's Handbook to the Bible to help me understand the cultural and historical context, then again in the evening to process and shake off the day's experiences. There have been more than a few days where I definitely did not follow this ideal pattern to my day (Tuesdays and Thursdays frequently lack more than one reading due to a certain 8:15 am class I have...), and the days where I entirely skip quiet time spent with God are the days where I really miss God everywhere else too. The point is, my original motivation for reading Jeremiah was to ask God if I really had to stay at Gateway International Church with my parents, and if so, why? My early assumption when God invited me to read Jeremiah was that God was going to make me a Jeremiah-like prophet to the *social-skills-challenged and stereotypically conservative evangelical* church members. Um, not so much. As everyone knows, an analogy is only convincing to the degree that the situations or objects being compared are similar. In this case, I needed to know how similar our church population is to Judaic and Israeli society at the time of Jeremiah. Not very. In fact, it's not a fair comparison. First, society is not static. It changes as the people within it make decisions impacting its institutions and governments, which in turn impact and change society. Judah goes through 5 kings in Jeremiah's lifetime, and becomes progressively more evil as time goes on (with a slight reprieve under Josiah's reign). Gateway has gone through no changes in leadership since I started attending it faithfully in January. Second, Jeremiah knew the people he was talking to: he cried because God sent dire warnings and curses to areas where his own family lived. He often had to prophesy to his own friends and people he was well acquainted with. In contrast, I really don't know the people of Gateway. They're not mine. I don't know their names, their struggles, their strengths, their personalities, what they do with their time outside of church, or what their favourite flavour of icecream is. Therefore, it is unreasonable to meaningfully compare the experiences of my 4 years of sporadic, limited time spent in Church with Jeremiah's 4 decades spent immersed intimately in all affairs of his culture. This made me wonder if I should instead be comparing my whole society (The Western World, Canada) to the Jews of Jeremiah's time. Some things are similar, sometimes. On one hand, God calls his people to give up many things, including pride, arrogance, power, injustice, idolatry, and dependence on human acts such as ritual, treaties, and strategies. These sound pretty descriptive of here to me. On the other hand, God also lists as major grievances that Judah was practicing human sacrifice (7:31, 19:5), and that there was not a single honest person among them. We don't make it our practice to burn our children alive, and individuals who do are generally punished severely by the government with the explicit approval of the citizens. Our society has definitely run to many other gods, such as oil, gas, wealth, and happiness, but there are still more than 2 people who seek God. Thus, the "don't pray for these people anymore," command really doesn't apply to me. I have a theory. It goes like this: in terms of morality, there are many "grey" actions in the world. Some are truly grey, in that they have no inherent meaning in them, either good or bad (ex. hair length/colour). Face it, God likes variety in nature. Some practices only appear grey due to a confounding marbling of black and white swirls, and this is the moral state I believe most societies undulate in with various ratios of white:blackness dependent on the overall combined frequency of their constituting members' relations with each other, God, and the environment. God gives us a lot of mercy in the grey areas, continually sending us verbal and physical commands, warnings, and encouragements to clean up our mixed acts. But there are limits. There came a point where God told Jeremiah to stop praying for his people, because his mind was made up. God gave them a final ultimatum: life or death. Those who surrendered to Nebuchadnezzar would live. Not an entirely happy life: they would be taken as captives to a foreign land to live as second-class citizens, but if their children learned from their parents' mistakes, they would at least get the chance to go back. Those who fled to Egypt or stayed in the city of Jerusalem would die by famine, sword, or disease. They'd crossed the point of no return, where the only way to separate the white from the black was to disperse and destroy them completely. They chose by their own actions. Likewise, we are continually given commands, warnings, and encouragements to do what is right, with some of our choices culminating in a point of no return, a deciding battle. Parkdale EMC hit one of those points. We chose death and were dispersed to try again somewhere else. Choosing to ignore those communications or to put them off, is a decision with a real consequence. Am I moving towards the black or the white? Can I see the distinction between the two where it is confused in the world? Do I seek God's help in pulling it apart and encouraging the white to grow? Do I help others to do the same? Wow, it's been 2 weeks and I can't remember why I started writing this post. Anyways, my fast from Starbucks is over now but I still haven't figured out what I'm supposed to be doing at Gateway. I feel bitter and irritated about the church's inability to be with people outside their 'perfect' circle but Amy advised me to focus on loving the young adults group before I try to teach them, to make them my own. God keeps telling me the same thing so I guess I'll start by trying to hang out w/ them a little more often...